ABSTRACT
Public health care is concerned with the health of populations. Public health practitioners take a wider view than health care practitioners, whose primary responsibility is to help individual patients. Thus while doctors or nurses are usually concerned to deliver the best possible care to the patients they are treating, public health specialists will step back from this direct interaction and may be concerned about the people who do not use or have access to health services. Also, they might wonder whether there is some intervention that could have prevented the ill-health in the first place. The responsibilities of public health practitioners vary from place to place but can include roles such as developing health promotion strategies, protection from and investigation of environmental hazards, communicable disease control, vaccination programmes, health care needs assessment, community development and the evaluation and planning of health services. The common theme behind all these tasks is that decisions are being made about and on behalf of groups of people, not individuals.
